I obviously wasn't paying a great deal of attention when I picked this book up at the library, because I was expecting another installment in King's series of Sherlock Holmes novels. The Art of Detection is more properly described as a Kate Martinelli novel - another one of King's serial characters, a San Francisco detective - although it involves the discovery of an unpublished Conan Doyle story narrated by Sherlock Holmes, thereby loosely linking King's two popular mystery series.
I'm not sure if the linking together really worked. The short story is narrated out within the pages of this book, and I became quite distracted with it, which reduced my interest in the resolution of the "real" mystery that Kate was trying to solve. There were almost too many threads to this - Kate's family life, characters from previous Kate novels, the murder (or is it a murder?) that Kate's trying to solve, and then the story-within-a-story. At times, I thought it moved rather slowly.
However, King's skill draws everything together at the end - a satisfactorily tense resolution to Kate's case - and the murdered character whose life is revealed slowly through the book is quite fascinating. It's not one of King's best books - I'm really more a fan of her Sherlock novels - but still an enjoyable read, if you persevere through the occasional slow patches.
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